Reactionaries are playing for keeps in the provinces
Photograph Courtesy of: Florida Photographic Collection, State Library and Archives of Florida.
Under the guise of “election integrity,” Republican secretaries of state held a two-day conference in Washington in February to discuss efforts to restrict voter access to the ballot box. The watchdog group Documented shared documents from the Heritage Foundation-sponsored event with the Guardian.
“A list of attendees namechecks the chief election officials of Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia,” write Ed Pilkington and Jamie Corey:
The keynote speech was given by Ken Blackwell, former secretary of state in Ohio. He was an early adopter of Trump’s lie about rigged elections, championing the idea in the 2016 presidential race which Trump won.
Blackwell now chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute, a rightwing thinktank led by former Trump officials. The center has been touting election-related model legislation.
Heritage was careful to organize the conference amid tight secrecy. Among the records obtained by Documented is an email from Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the foundation who leads their election work.
Responding to a query about the event from a Texas official, Von Spakovsky said: “There is no livestream. This is not a public event. It is a private, confidential meeting of the secretaries. I would rather you not send out a press release about it.”
Yeah, that Hans von Spakovsky.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf) and the Honest Elections Project (HEP) joined Heritage in sponsoring the event.
Pilf “sues election officials to force them to purge voter rolls,” Pilkington and Corey write, while HEP “is a conservative dark-money group closely tied to the Republican operative Leonard Leo who was instrumental in engineering the current conservative supermajority on the US supreme court.”
Speakers were a who’s-who of GOP “election denial and voter suppression” promoters.
Heritage has updated the “election fraud database” it once called a voter fraud database. When last I looked, it padded out its list of 1,088 citations with cases dating back to 1948. As I wrote in 2018, any and all varieties of election rigging, registration fraud, vote-buying, even ballot petition fraud are lumped together under the rubric of voter fraud (which they use interchangeably with election fraud). Perhaps embarrassed by that 1948 citation, their update contains 1,422 stretching back only to 1982, a period in which billions of votes have been cast.
Listen, the left in this country needs to get serious about taking on these people. They mean to reduce the Constitution to a series of conservative preferences and to gut the rest. There is a war on, and not the civil war armed MAGA lunatics thirst for. This one is led by people in ties. It is happening quietly in the states and behind closed doors by Americans in birth certificate only.
Heather Cox Richardson hits some of the lowlights:
Since the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states have passed “election reform” measures that restrict the vote; those efforts are ongoing. On Thursday alone, the Texas Senate advanced a number of new restrictions. In the wake of high turnout among Generation Z Americans, who were born after 1996 and are more racially and ethnically diverse than their elders, care deeply about reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and want the government to do more to address society’s ills, Republican legislatures are singling out the youth vote to hamstring.
That determination to silence younger Americans is playing out today in Tennessee, where a school shooting on March 28 in Nashville killed six people, including three 9-year-olds. The shooting has prompted protesters to demand that the legislature honor the will of the people by addressing gun safety, but instead, Republicans in the legislature have moved to expel three Democratic lawmakers who approached the podium without being recognized to speak—a breach of House rules—and led protesters in chants calling for gun reform. As Republicans decried the breach by Representatives Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson, protestors in the galleries called out, “Fascists!”
Richardson hears echoes of the backlash to Reconstruction. Today’s MAGA Republicans “reject the principles that underpin democracy, including the ideas of equality before the law and separation of church and state, and instead want to impose Christian rule on the American majority.” And while progressives fuss about Donald Trump, Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, conservative extremists with lower profiles are busily at work on Jim Crow 2.0 and worse.
Their conviction that American “tradition” focuses on patriarchy rather than equality is a dramatic rewriting of our history, and it has led to recent attacks on LGBTQ Americans. In Kansas today, the legislature overrode Democratic governor Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill banning transgender athletes who were assigned male at birth from participating in women’s sports. Kansas is the twentieth state to enact such a policy, and when it goes into effect, it will affect just one youth in the state.
Yesterday, Idaho governor Brad Little signed a law banning gender-affirming care for people under 18, and today Indiana governor Eric Holcomb did the same.
Meanwhile, Republican-dominated states are so determined to ignore the majority they are also trying to make it harder for voters to challenge state laws through ballot initiatives. Alice MIranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly of Politico recently wrote about how, after voters in a number of states overrode abortion bans through ballot initiatives, legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma are now debating ways to make it harder for voters to get measures on the ballot, sometimes even specifying that abortion-related measures are not eligible for ballot challenges.
They are serious. They take a long view. They are committed. Are we?